Did you know that a recent report shared that only 15% of pastors say that their church recognizes its need to change, but 85% say that their church is in denial of the changes they need to make to be effective? This is a startling statistic.
It’s only when we see our church through fresh eyes that we can begin to lead our church with greater effectiveness. Rob Koke said to me once, “All the passion in the world isn’t going to cause us to have churches that reach people locally. We’ve got to get better at developing a wineskin that’s going to work in our cities.” I still remember that lunch we had. We wanted to enter into something new, but to do that, we first had to seek God’s will through prayer, study, and time with the right people.
Three questions come to mind to help guide us in the process of seeing our churches through fresh eyes:
- Is our heart characterized by denial or desire? Which characterizes our church? I think the truth is all leaders have experienced both. If we’re going to see our church with fresh eyes, we have to address and overcome this issue in the heart of the church before God can take the church to a better place.
Remember in Exodus 17 when Moses prayed the prayer that every pastor has prayed, “Oh God, kill me!” The people weren’t responding to his leadership. Like it or not, most people aren’t deep, critical thinkers; they’re consumers. Their solution to things not going well is to fire the leader because “he’s the problem.” Moses called out to God, and God gave him the best advice.
First, He told him to go in front of the people. To me, that means prayer has to be your first skill. When you pray, the people will know the Holy Spirit is with you. That’s going to be a contagious draw for them to go to a new place.
Then God said, “Take some of the leaders with you.” That’s vision casting. Don’t get upset if you can’t take them all with you because some people have issues. It’s not always your fault, pastor.
Then God instructed Moses to take in his hand the staff. When you develop a history of creating new wineskins, you can look to people. They start trusting you.
- Is the vision and mission of the future known by everyone? What is God calling you to do? How are you doing it? Do your members know the plan? In the early days of my ministry at Faith Family Church, we’d see few to no salvations on a yearly basis. Then, I started reminding our people of the vision. I’d say, “How many of you think if we brought some people today they would have responded to the gospel?” They began to look at me like, “This dude’s serious!” It didn’t take long before we went from zero to 365 salvations in one year. Then we had over a thousand, and we’ve had thousands since. In a county of only 90,000, we’ve seen more than 20% of this town give their life to Christ at some point. We didn’t do it! I was just a guy trying to figure things out. The skill of prayer brought the vision.Our mission is to bring people to church. It’s simple but beautiful. We’ve had a number of phrases to help with this, but the most common one we use is, “We’re not here to see through people; we’re here to see people through.” Then the phrase evolved, and we became the church with a heart for all people. That’s when crazy things began to happen in society, and people would come up to me, asking, “Are you really the church with a heart for all people?”One thing I have to clarify is that I’m not preaching better messages; our people are just doing the Great Commission better. Because of that, things are changing. Between this year and last, I think we’ve had 600 people join the church. This is a direct result of a change in the culture of our church.
- Are the ministry environments we lead easy-going or are people executing well and with great enjoyment? You can enjoy what you’re doing and not be doing things well. Or you can be doing things well and not have any joy about it. Both of these are problems. Let me illustrate:In 2003, I was invited to speak at the weekend services of a church of 3,000 people in France. I was invited to speak in their Bible school during the week too. This was back in the days of the fax machine. Tamara came to me with the fax from this church in hand, and she said, “You’ve been invited to preach in Paris, and I prayed, and I think the answer is yes.” I said, “Oh, really?” “Yes, and I’m going with you.” They gave a generous honorarium, but I lost money taking Tamara with me. Anyway, we went to see Notre Dame while we were there, and I got sick inside because all I could see was this beautiful church that was once facilitating the life of God among people, and now it is nothing more than architecture. The special spirit that once made the church great was gone.That’s what seeing your church through a fresh set of eyes is all about. It’s about praying so that special spirit fills up our church again, so that the spirit doesn’t grow stale.
Prayer changes things. It changes our hearts. It helps us. It empowers us to vision cast. When you begin to share your new vision and new mission, powerful things are going to happen. Don’t keep this process to yourself. Encourage all your leaders to pray and seek the Lord. Every leader should be hearing from God about the rich things He wants to do in their area of influence. Then, as you come together, you’ll have an inspired team of leaders that wants to get everybody involved in the process of needed change!
Blog created using content from webinar Seeing Your Church with a Fresh Set of Eyes.
